So, we put out Bugzilla 3.6rc1 today. That’s pretty exciting. We’re currently two months ahead of schedule on our 3.6 releases–the first time we’ve ever been ahead of schedule in Bugzilla’s history. Since this is a Release Candidate, it has Release Notes, which you should read, particularly because they contain the whole list of all the cool new features in 3.6. In addition to all the major new features listed, the Other Enhancements and Changes has a ton of improvements that many Bugzilla users will be very happy about.
We also released Bugzilla 3.4.6, which has some good bug fixes for the 3.4 series, so if you’re running 3.4.x, it’d definitely be good to upgrade to 3.4.6.
Work Towards Bugzilla 3.8
Yep, that’s right, that says 3.8. See, as soon as we freeze for one release, we start working on the next release immediately. So although we’ve been working quite a bit on getting 3.6 out the door, we’ve also been adding some new features for 3.8, since February.
Our focus for 3.8 is still pretty much the same as it was for 3.6–polish up things, finish any “unfinished” features, and generally make everything suck less as much as possible. However, 3.8 is also going to include some major new UI work, thanks to Guy Pyrzak, our User Experience Lead. Already, there is work on a new attachment details UI and a simplification of the Search UI.
Also, a few other features have been implemented recently for 3.8:
- Work is underway on a single-package Windows installer for Apache, MySQL, Perl, and Bugzilla.
- The voting system has become an extension, which also involved adding a few useful new hooks.
- You can specify “groups” as an argument when creating a bug via the WebService or email.
- The Assignee, QA Contact, and CC fields have autocomplete in the browser, via AJAX!
- You can restrict the visibility and values of custom fields by components.
- The Deadline field now has a Calendar widget attached to it.
- Bugzilla now sends email when a comment becomes private or un-private.
- You can undo “Forget Search” on the buglist if you forgot the search by accident.
- “Bug ID” fields can now represent relationships between bugs, like “Blocks”/”Depends On”.
Coming up soon, we also will have the following new features:
- JSONP support for the JSON-RPC WebServices interface, so you can do secure cross-domain WebService calls on web pages.
- There’s some work towards making Bugzilla use HTML 5.
- The ability to restrict the visibility and values of custom fields by classification.
- More JavaScript validation of enter_bug.cgi when filing bugs
Bugzilla’s Move To Bzr
So, for day-to-day development, the Bugzilla Project now uses the Bazaar Version-Control System, instead of CVS. Our tarballs and download instructions still use CVS, for now, but internally, for development, we use Bazaar.
Our instructions on using Bazaar are here:
There is also a web view of the Bazaar repository for people who want to browse around our code.
CVS is kept fully in-sync with the Bazaar code, so if you checkout or update from CVS, you’ll be getting the same code that’s in Bazaar.
EOL of Bugzilla 3.0.x
When we release Bugzilla 3.6, Bugzilla 3.0.x will reach End Of Life, meaning that no new updates will be released for the 3.0 series, even if there are security issues discovered. We strongly encourage all Bugzilla 3.0.x administrators to upgrade to Bugzilla 3.4.x or 3.6rc1.
-Max
The Bugzilla Update 